The begining of my journey....August 2004

I was diagnosed in August 2004, I was 31 at the time.

July 8th, I woke up with severe abdominal pains and later that morning I saw a doctor at the hospital where I worked. Dr. Edge did x-rays and scans. About an hour later he told me he was admitting me because he found a large mass on my liver. They wanted to biopsy the mass but my mother thought better of that.
I was referred to Dr. Steve Bynon at the Kirklin Clinic in Birmingham, AL. He told me I needed to have the scan removed. He said it could possibly be an adnoma or possibly a malignant mass. I was in danger of the mass rupturing, so it had to come out.

In August, I had a partial liver resection. He said the surgery should last about 2 1/2 hours and it ended up lasting 7 hours and 45 minutes. Because of the way my blood vessels were formed at birth, he had to reconstruct my blood vessels. I was literally a text book case he said. I was in SICU for about 3 days. I had surgery on a Thursday and went home the next Thursday. I was told the mass was Fibrolamellar Hepatocellular Carcinoma. He said there would be no treatments done. He said surgery was the cure.

Dr. Bynon told me there was a 70% chance of the cancer coming back within the first year. He did tell me the survival rate after diagnosis was 5 years.

He told me I would be monitored by scans every 3 months for the first year and then every 6 monhts.

My surgery was done at UAB Hospital in Birmingham, Alabama by Dr. Steve Bynon.